Everyone who knows me wants to know how my job is going. The problem with that is twofold. The first is that Alert Logic has very strict policies in place regarding what I can and cannot say publicly. The second is that my job is so highly specialized that if I started talking about it, your eyes would glaze over within about 30 seconds. Believe me, you really don’t want to know if you aren’t “in the know,” you know? For instance, today I had several clients whose threat detection was in alarm and I had to ssh into the appliance and run nmap, traceroute, and ping. Geeks would know what I’m talking about, but for the rest of you, it just sounds like Lanaganese.

See, I told you. You really don’t want to hear about my job.

However, I can tell you about the culture at the company, and I am a big fan. We work and play hard. Sodas, coffee, and tea are all subsidized by the company so that we can stay caffeinated for next to nothing… which is good because we are a 24/7 operation. There is a Pac-man table in the break room and the first Wednesday of every month the company gives us waffles.

My team lead is a sassy black woman named Jasmine, and everyone is a little bit in love with her. She is just too cute, and she knows it. 🙂 I look forward to work every day because Jaz is going to be there. I am overjoyed that I look forward to work every day, and I am blessed that they pay me an obscene amount of money.

Well, it’s not an OBSCENE amount of money, but it seems like it because Texas doesn’t have state tax and having Dana on my insurance policy isn’t SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS A MONTH. Plus, we live about ten minutes from my office, which, in Houston, is kind of unreal. Most of my coworkers commute almost an hour in traffic.

This is the first time I’ve worked in Houston where literally none of my coworkers are from here. They’re all transplants from the rest of the country and completely in love with the city because, despite the heat, their cost of living is in the basement and they have more disposable income than they’ve ever had before. Of course they miss home, but being able to live large is appealing no matter who you are. They’re glad to live in a place where they don’t have to choose between food and rent- a problem that most of my friends in Portland struggle with even still. I know I’ve been there, and I hope every day that life ceases to be a struggle for them.

My personal life is blooming because all the people that I’ve missed while I’ve been away are showing up in droves. Apparently, I am a very popular writer and Facebooker. It’s been exciting to hear people say things like, “how come we didn’t know you were so damn funny?” I am flattered and just stand there and blush all at the same time.

Being mired in grief is over, and gone are the days of endless running monologue regarding it. Losing someone so fundamental to my personality was devastating, and if that seems entirely too codependent for words, it was. That’s why you recover from emotional abuse, you don’t snap out of it. There is just no way to surface gracefully when you are flailing and drowning in anxiety. Recovering from my abusive relationship was frankly just embarrassing, because my experience was that my abuser took little to no credit for anything and just blamed me for everything, even though the relationship started before I even turned 13.

I knew I was a child and I still thought she was right. I felt stupid in a way that I never had before.

That’s why this job is a miracle. I get to sit with the smart kids every day, and sometimes, I get to be the smartest. I get to say a hearty “fuck you”to grief and a gregarious “bring it on” to my own life. I get to welcome every day the fact that I think. I have opinions. I know stuff.

I’d tell you what it is, but you know…

It’s so hard when you’re in the middle of recovery from emotional abuse, but once your brain acquires some equilibrium, a sort of normalcy settles over you that wasn’t there before. It’s disconcerting, because for the first time in your life, normal reactions feel unhealthy and you have to lean into them, instead of what you’ve been told your whole life; lies and secrecy are the way of the world. If you tell anyone anything at any time, it’s going to let me down, and we’re both going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

The trouble with that take-home message is that from an abuser, it’s a double-edged sword. 95% of the time, the abuser shuts down emotionally and cannot support you in your grief and anger. You can’t bring yourself to tell anyone what you’ve been through, so there’s no one else to tell, either. Emotional abuse begins so slowly that you don’t even realize it, and by the time you figure out what’s going on, you’re trapped in someone else’s stories. You become fearful of living your own life because you are already so emotionally laden that your own life feels far away… a hazy dream that appears in the moments when you remember what you were like before it started.

In my own case, before it started was almost a quarter century ago. That’s almost 25 years of feeling strangled by someone else’s mess. I am only 36 now. You do the math. How quickly did I have to grow up? How quickly was my childhood taken away from me? Feeling like the one who was responsible for an adult’s behavior started literally the day I turned 13, and by the time I was 14, I had all the emotional responsibilities of what I thought was taking care of someone and what was actually being a very inappropriate garbage bin for someone else’s pain. Years of sexual abuse mixed with drug use mixed with an abusive spouse mixed with sexualized poetry turned the idea of confiding in a 12-year-old okay.

It was fine until a few months ago, when all of it caught up to me at once and I was tired of screaming into a black hole. I was so miserable that I literally wanted to die, and I thought about it often. I say that not to scare you, just to illustrate just how bad verbal abuse gets. Just because my abuser never raped me doesn’t mean that she didn’t damage me from the inside out.

To me, the thing that separates physical from verbal abuse is that physical abuse is right out there in plain sight. If we had been romantically involved (and I use that term loosely because of the age difference), I would have at least been *sure* it was wrong. The bitch of verbal abuse is that you start to believe that it’s you that’s broken. It’s you that’s worthless. It’s you that can’t live up to your abuser’s standards and that’s how it’s supposed to be because you don’t know anything else.

Abusive people, and this is only my opinion, simply lack the capacity to take responsibility for their actions. It isn’t that they are bad people. It’s that their brains just aren’t wired to think that way. They’re wired to deflect everything away from them because they just want the pain to stop.

Enablers, the chosen recipients of abuse, pick up this behavior pretty quickly. It isn’t malicious when we lie, cheat, and steal to avoid culpability. it’s that we learn early on that the truth will be met with emotional violence and we’ll do anything to avoid it. For instance, we know that if we breathe a word of anything, you’ll withold affection for as long as it takes. We also know that “as long as it takes” is a vague term that you’ll never define.

As an enabler myself, all I ever hoped is that 25 years would be enough… And it was…

For me.

So much has been going on that I literally don’t know where to start. After we arrived in Houston, we had a few days to ourselves before our friends arrived with our stuff. Keith, nicknamed “Volfe,” and Sarah have been invaluable friends because they were able to bring everything with them that we couldn’t. It was cheaper than a moving service, and as a bonus, our friends have gotten to stay long enough that when we talk on the phone, they can really picture how our lives are going, instead of our Houston house being this mythical place that swept us away from Oregon. We’ve gotten to do a bit of sightseeing, and tomorrow, we’re going to Austin. That’s where Volfe’s mom lives, and also where my friend James moved a few months ago. James and I have known each other since the first day of school in 1995. For those of you who want to do the math, I was a senior and James was a junior. We don’t really like to think of it that way, though. We just like to think of it as a long, long time. Neither one of us really wants to feel that old. 🙂

At the same time, though, coming home to Texas has been amazing, because none of my friends have really even been aware of the fact that I left. I mean that in the best possible way, because it is as if the miles between us weren’t. We’ve just picked up where we’ve left off, as if leaving Houston was just a pause button on a cosmic DVR.

I was also miserable in Portland, and not just a little bit. However, it had nothing to do with the place. I am tied to the Columbia River Gorge and it holds some of my deepest, darkest secrets. No, in Portland, the misery was all emotional. I had a hard time finding a job, and I had a hard time not being mired in carpet-sucking depression. It made sense, really. The weather was making me sick. As I’ve mentioned before, depression and lack of calcium absorption spiraled my depression into what felt like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I got tired of never having the energy to do anything.

Slowly, that is lifting. I still have days where I do not want to see anyone or anything, but they are fewer and farther between. I think that’s because I’ve been so determined to be healthy… not in a “fake it til you make it” sort of way, just in an “I know I need Vitamin D, and the only answer is to sit outside” kind of way. That seems like it would be easy, but keep in mind that I moved to Houston in the absolute hottest part of the year, and I still insisted on the backyard being my domain. Sitting in the sunshine was like a new pair of glasses. I saw everything more clearly as my vitamin deficiency started to resolve itself. The added bonus is that the more time I spend outside, the more I’ve become acclimated to it. My arms are as brown as my Latino neighbor’s skin, and my cheeks are a rosy pink for the first time in years.

I also don’t feel as worthless. I have a job. I got paid today. We have a house and a car and a lawn mower. Such simple things, and yet, it’s everything I’ve ever wanted. I came to Houston to reach out for more, and literally touched the face of God…

because God reveals God’s own heart when you know yourself and where you sit inside it.

Dear ______ (because I can’t think of a name to insert, but it’s going to be one of those entries where I just write a personal letter to all of you),

Coming home from Portland was the right thing to do, even though people call Dana my “friend” and there’s no Biddy McGraw’s here. Portland, for me, was just one struggle after another. I got so frustrated that I moved back home… and then moved back 18 months later. Houston was not the city back then that it is now. I endured a lot of prejudice, a lot of it coming from people I already knew and not from strangers. However, when I moved back, Portland wasn’t the city it used to be, either. Unemployment was too high, the city was too expensive, and for all the benefits we had there, they didn’t matter. We could barely feed ourselves.

I also had to work on myself emotionally. When I left for Oregon the second time, I still had terrible boundaries and couldn’t bear to stand up for myself because I thought that people would just think I was being an imposition, because that’s how it had come across when I’d tried to stand up for myself before.

Feeling like you’re imposing on someone is sometimes the worst feeling in the world, depending on the situation. There are those times when what you need is truly maddening, but if you have terrible boundaries, the flip side is that your friends will get used to you never needing anything and will treat you like dirt when all of the sudden, you try and grow a backbone.

For me, the hardest part has been sticking to my guns even when I feel threatened. Threatened is a harsh word, but it’s exactly how I feel when my request is met with anger and frustration at “being needy…” because I know it’s not true. I jump on the defensive because even though I understand people and the fact that they have their own stories to tell, rejection feels a lot like a knife to your front.

But at least you can see it coming.

Then, if you’re perceptive enough, you realize the paradigm shift. People are calling you needy because they can’t or won’t try to understand. Don’t want to take the time because you’re so insignificant. If you’re not the perceptive type, you’ll keep jumping up and down trying to get noticed, instead of just realizing that your friend is a jerk and you need to go to someone who won’t make you jump up and down in the first place.

Making the connection between healthy and abusive is what led me to Houston. I realized that I had a lot more ways to deal with feeling like the world was ending because someone didn’t like/trust/respect me. It hurts because I would like to think I’m the type of friend you keep. It hurts when you’ve been told your entire life that you matter above everything else, but actions and words say complete opposite things.

Healthy is where actions and words match up, even when the outcome is separation. You may not like it, but at least you’re parting ways knowing the truth. There’s so much dysfunction in the world that it’s often not possible to get the answers you want, because a lot of people retreat into their own shells instead of facing problems head on and handling them with care.

Learning to be healthy has not only given me better boundaries, it has given me the ability to spot when words and actions don’t line up and call people on them. Because I’ve been so meek about asking for help until now, even the smallest thing sets people off because they feel like they don’t know you anymore. You’re not the friend you were.

You’re fallible, human, and alive.

Just like them.

I can’t believe how much the last week has made a difference in my mood. Portland was literally making me sick because of the lack of sunlight. If I were a child, they would have diagnosed me with Rickets, but for adults, it leads to osteomalacia (which is “Doctorspeak” for softening bones or “Adult Rickets”). No matter what I did, I couldn’t shake the ever-present cloud of carpet-sucking depression that followed me wherever I went. At one point, my stepmom (a rheumatologist) drew my blood and ran some tests. I got a phone call the next day. “Congratulations! You have the lowest Vitamin D level of anyone in my 30 year old practice!” It was six. Translation? That’s not good. Normal Vitamin D level is somewhere between 30 and 50. The Mayo Clinic web site says this: “Vitamin D deficiency is associated with various diseases, such as bone loss, osteoarthritis, cognitive issues, kidney disease, respiratory concerns, diabetes, gastrointestinal issues, cardiovascular disease, etc.” By “cognitive issues,” I am pretty sure this means that Vitamin D deficiency is linked to all kinds of mental illness.

Moving back to Houston has made me realize that I was willing to stick it out in Portland only because I didn’t realize the lack of sun was such a big problem. In response, I’ve been sitting on my back porch for hours at a time (with sunscreen, of course), just meditating on all the ways that the sun is healing me.

I have no doubt  that staying in Portland could have been fatal, because I was so down so far that I couldn’t see past the fact that I felt sick in my head. The reality was that I ended up attributing a lot of behavior to my depression, when it wasn’t my depression at all. The lack of sun, for lack of a better term, was canceling my medication out altogether.

Being here has basically just calmed my little ass down. I am emotionally much stronger, because everything I’ve learned in Al-anon that didn’t stick the first time is now coming into my present consciousness. It is important, this recognition, because I’ve been learning how to use good emotional tools. I just wasn’t strong enough to stick to them and let them help me. Emotional tools only go so far if you’re willing to throw them out at the first sign of conflict. If you’re anything like me, throwing out good emotional tools leaves me with a thin, thin layer of cushion between what I say and what I mean. As Mark Twain once said, “the difference between the right word and the wrong one is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

It’s also the difference between gaining friends and losing them, because if you are determined enough to be depressed and alone, no one will stop you. I believe that this is partly because of the “Genovese syndrome,” and partly because no one can stop you from doing anything if you’re determined enough.

In order to break the willpower to become depressed and stay that way, I escaped from Portland back to my hometown. However, I didn’t know that the sun would heal me. That was just an added bonus.

Love and light to all y’all.

Our flight isn’t until 12:10, but I can’t sleep. The day is swirling around like a Kaleidoscope with one broken spoke… that underlying tension that everyone sees but doesn’t acknowledge. For every family, that’s a different thing. In our case, it’s that I’ve lived in Houston before and Dana hasn’t. I know all the good things that await us, and she does not. It’s going to take more time for her to become adjusted to living in Houston in the first place.

And as she sleeps, all I want is the assurance of her happiness, but there is none. All I can do is pray for her and the path that she’s on to complete herself. What Dana wants is what I will give her, because there has never been anything that I needed where Dana has said no. Turnabout is fair play. She gave me the world. Now I hope it’s my turn.

If there is anything positive that is coming out of trying to get healthy, it’s knowing when I’ve made a mistake and not letting my first reaction be “stuff and deny.” If you had met me a year ago, I would have told you that I have no problems at all. That’s how I’ve lived my entire life- nothing is wrong with me, let me do for you, let me take care of you, let me let you walk all over me until I can’t stand it anymore.

When you do that, you set yourself on a pedestal that creates a hard fall. If someone hasn’t made the connection that you’re fallible, when they do, they can’t understand it. It doesn’t compute. But that’s not their fault. I’ve never needed anything from anybody, and now I do. Most of that is forgiveness for just being a right jackass in the midst of the most terrible time in my life.

I’ve even gone through it with Dana. The other day she was talking about how completely I’d fallen apart and she didn’t have any support. Was that before or after I called everyone I knew and said, “I’m going down, and Dana needs some help.” I knew this was going to ruin me ahead of time, but in my best hopes, it is breaking eggs to create an omelet.

In order to rise from the ashes, it usually means there’s been a fire. In AA, the first step is admitting you have a problem. In Al-anon, the first step (for me, at least) has been admitting that I am clever and stupid enough to throw the first match. It’s not my fault, and it is. I am responsible for my current behavior, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons for it, stemming back to an age where I couldn’t be held responsible for the kind of emotional system I set up for myself. My outer self is trying to grow up, while my old patterns are trying to say, “come back… this is where it’s safe.” The space between those two ideas is the difference between the high road and the low one.

Going back to what I know is just pure id. I’m too scared to embark on this new life, so I grasp at straws of my old personality when the new one feels like my “clothes are too big.” I have ADD, so my impulse control is naturally impotent when I need it.

Becoming new and whole is a journey, not a destination. I am on the beginning end of learning great emotional tools, not the end. My nerves are frayed in a way that they never have been before. A dream that I’ve had since I was 18 years old may come true quickly- definitely on God’s terms and not on mine, but still. I have a lot of work to do.

And then, even then, the Rev. Leslie Lanagan is still going to be an ordinary asshole with an extraordinary calling. Because even the Rev. Leslie Lanagan will still have all her flaws and failures, because that Leslie is not a separate personality. It is more important for me to show my humanness now than ever, because what parishioner really wants to go to a pastor that hasn’t been in their shoes? Hasn’t understood what it’s like to be entirely, completely wrong and still had someone love and affirm them anyway?

There’s an old story that Leo McGarry tells the President’s staff on The West Wing:

Guy spends all day in a hole 8 feet deep. Guy screams for help, and a passerby jumps down the hole to help him. The guy that’s been trapped all day says, “NOW YOU’VE JUST SCREWED US BOTH.” The guy who jumps says, “I’ve been in this hole before, and I know the way out.”

I have to believe that someday, all my flaws and failures can be used to pull other people out of the behaviors they hate about themselves, because they can see them laid out on the page, here, in black & white. I’m not scared of the things that make me appeal to my basest self, because I know that everyone has those same behaviors inside. I just care less whether you care what I’ve done in my life, because of two things:

If I treat you like a human, in all of your failures, I expect it in return. If you don’t respect me as much as I respect you, I am less concerned with whether I need to answer your needs. I do not want to set up any pattern in which you get complete forgiveness for your actions and I don’t.

Your reaction to my flaws and failures is not mine to own. Your reactions are your reactions. You have what you can put up with and what you can’t. I will not live in fear of what you think.

Because you know I’d do the same for you.

I am speechless, but I have to type. I have just been told about a program in which I could be a working minister very quickly. I’m going to go for it.

That being said, I have some concerns. The only one I really want to share publicly is that I am in terrible mental shape and no one should let me do any pastoral care at this point. I need to keep going to my Al-anon meetings, because I’m finding that it opens me up more than individual therapy. Somehow, being in a room where everyone has the same story is more healing than one person in which to confide. You have a whole room of people saying, “yup. Been there.” But at the same time, I want a professional opinion from someone who, even in the secular world, ministers to people all the time. I want to know whether a psychologist thinks that I have psychologist-level ways of deflecting so that I am not working fried all day and can’t sleep because Mrs. Gunderson’s son has been picked up by the police for drug trafficking, then, later that day, Mr. Abelard was killed in a car accident, I have four hospital visits, my kid is sick, and my wife is being hateful.

As I have said many times, I tend to take on the pain of others, which is an essential thing that you have to learn not to do. A little bit of clinical separation is what allows you to deal with other people’s problems without them becoming your problems, too. It would paralyze me as an effective leader, and pastors much greater than I’ll ever be talk about this interminable march of organized chaos often.

Being a pastor is only about ten percent getting up in front of people. The rest of the time, people are in front of you. In my dad’s first week at one of his churches, one of the kids in the youth group lost his father, and TWO things happened at that week’s summer camp: 1) Some of the senior highers were caught playing strip poker. 2) One of the senior high girls had found another girl at camp in the directory whose address was the same as her father’s rent house. She found out that her dad had been hiding a whole other family from her.

In his first week at one of his other churches, he found out that his predecessor had been sleeping with some of the women in his congregation, the entire church was fractured in half, and there was a bullet hole in the front window of the parsonage… from a parishioner.

It just makes you wonder, doesn’t it? God, if that was the first week, what the fuck have you got planned for the next one?

That’s why I feel I need to work towards being six feet tall and bulletproof emotionally. Being a pastor means that for the rest of my life, I will see people in the worst moments of theirs. In tragedy, people tend to call out for God, and the best thing I can do as a regional rep is to be there for them without injuring myself.

People, this blog just got more interesting.

God just knocked my punk ass down.

I’ve talked a lot about how places become characters in my stories. They may not be expressed in as much detail as there is in my mind, but please know that in every instance, I am very aware of where I am. Places become burned into my mind, because their personalities are just as loud. They just don’t speak English.

I do, though. And what I know is that where I say something is just as important as why. For instance, I don’t just remember that Houston is home.

I remember that the first time I saw it, I thought it was magic. When we actually moved there, I learned I was right.

My church at the time was a huge Austin-stone cathedral and I used to tell it all my secrets. If those walls could talk, it would be a lot more popular than this blog, I assure you. All my seventh and eighth grade secrets are in the recesses of the left transept, where the handbell tables provided my first “tree house.”

I talk a lot about how in all of my current grief, I have gone to the places that we shared and just talked. It is a pattern that developed here, in this time and place. She was always with me, even when she hadn’t arrived. I would sit under the bell table, with its white cloth so that she had to find me if I couldn’t hear her. I’d just talk and talk, because I had to think about what I wanted to say when she got there! My. Day. Was. Full.

When I got older, it was Crossroads bookstore th at held my deepest thoughts. I would go and get coffee alone with my notebook, and together we would explore the world. One of the best moments of my entire life was when my dad came to Crossroads with me. He saw a shirt that said, “I want to be Martha… the bitch can do everything.” He laughed until he nearly fell on the floor. Here was my dad, in a gay bookstore, and he was having a good time. Just watching him interact with everyone made me feel like he was trying really hard to bridge the gap between us, even though it never has been very far. Basically, we are one personality in two bodies, because that personality isn’t small enough for one person, anyway. The fact remains, though, that I’m gay and he’s straight. There’s a lot about my life that he had to learn.

Crossroads bookstore is one of the places I saw it happen.

Jeremy, the clerk, said, “look at you, all nellied out!” We had just come from church, and I was in my Sunday best. Now, every time I wear a dress for anything, my dad tells me I’m all nellied out. What’s really funny is that I don’t think he knows where “nellied out” comes from. It’s from Little House on the Prairie.

Laugh it up, Chuckles.

When I’m in Sugar Land, which is where my parents live now, I have the same set of places that I do in Houston. More than once I have gone to my high school girlfriend’s old house just to lament that it looks woefully inadequate without a huge Canadian flag flying over the driveway.

And now I get the chance to create those places with Dana, the ones we’ll return to just to feel that feeling. The feeling we felt the first time we went there together. Dana has been my home for so long that bringing her to Houston feels like the most right thing we’ve done together in a very long time.

Because it used to be my place, and now it’s ours.

 

There will always be a hot dog restaurant called Big Frank’s in the Montrose of my mind. It is as if Big Frank’s has defined the neighborhood for me, because I still drive by and am surprised that now it’s a Chinese restaurant… even though it hasn’t been Big Frank’s for a hundred years. Big Frank’s is a fixed point for me as the entrance to Mecca.

This is because the journey from my house to HSPVA ran thusly:

1. Take Pecore until it becomes 11th St.
2. Turn left on Studewood.
3. Take Studewood until it turns into Studemont.
4. Take Studemont until it turns into Montrose.
5. Turn left on W. Alabama.
6. Turn right on Stanford.

I am not the only person that marks classic Montrose by food. Baba Yega. Bibas. Niko Nikos. All the gays have their favorite, and nine times out of ten, we’ve thrown up there. All Houston gays my age will also remember going to Heaven as if it was the Second Coming (or at least, someone’s). I was so tortured and locked up as a kid- so shy and quiet- that if J.K. Rowling’s concept of a Horcrux were real, these places would contain most of mine. Of course, Heaven burned down a long time ago, but I’m sure I’d figure out something.

Some of the greatest moments of my life were walking tours of Montrose after getting out of school, because I didn’t have to have a car. It was easier to spend time alone without one, because if I walked, I didn’t have to tell my Mom where to pick me up.

The first time I made a break for it was to find Inklings, a women’s bookstore that I’d heard about from a friend. It would have been perfect, except that Inklings wasn’t exactly in the neighborhood. I walked from ‘PVA to like, Richmond and Woodhead. It probably wouldn’t be a thing to me as an adult, but I was really afraid. I think it took me two and a half hours to get there because I was walking so slow. Everything seemed alien and it was the first time that I was walking down the street as an openly gay person. Single, but openly gay. I wanted someone to notice, as if there should have been some sort of applause. Keep in mind that by “out lesbian,” I had officially told one person. But that was one more person than I was ready to tell before. I HAD COME OUT. THERE MUST BE SOME SORT OF GLOW, RIGHT? There’s no glow.

I pranced around like one of those idiot people that can’t hide the fact that they’ve just lost their virginity. You and I both know what I’m talking about- that shit-eating grin that you hate to see on the faces of your co-workers because you know exactly what that means and just, ick.

I had the same delirious happiness on my face, but not because I’d gotten laid. I’d found out who I was. I had a word. I had a title. I was walking toward a bookstore that could help me learn about my tribe. They had a great kid and young adult section, and I sat on the floor. I read Leslea Newman’s “Heather Has Two Mommies,” and then I stumbled upon “Annie on My Mind” by Nancy Garden.

I read two pages, and I knew that this was it. This was THE book. I went up to the counter and tears stung the corners of my eyes as I’d gotten my allowance out of my pocket. The clerk put my book in a brown paper sack and I left with my eyes down, the emotional equivalent of leaving the money on the dresser. I was so ashamed.

The elation was gone when I had to go to the counter to pay. I was trying to put my big girl pants on, win one for the Gipper, pick an analogy. But in the choke, I got anxious and almost cried. The strength I felt a few moments before was gone. Now I had to get a novel about lesbians into my house without anyone knowing.

 

I don’t really have an article planned for tonight, just a general catch-up. Sometimes, being disconnected from my keyboard is a good thing, and sometimes I need it just to feel like I’m real… or rather, that I’m being real. Typing is literally how I learn about the way I think. I have tried to dictate notes, and it does not work for me. The digital sensation of my fingers on the keys actually propels me. It sounds like a sewing machine, and sometimes, the analogy translates. Sometimes not. I try to bring things around, but I’m ADD.

You’re laughing because you knew that. I get it. I’m not offended. Laugh it up, Chuckles.

I haven’t had my second interview with AlertLogic, but I’m glad I have it in the future. It’s something I can focus on to help me keep from freaking out about leaving Portland. It’s not just the people. It’s the place. I am a Virgo, which I choose to use in the very best sense of the archetype. I am tied to the land. I collect rocks. I remember the places where I have had amazing emotional transformations and I go back to them, even if it’s years later.

I do not have that connection with Houston yet, because I grew up in a culture that told me being outside was kind of weird. Seriously, if you are doing anything outside in Houston, people naturally think that you are just too poor to afford adequate housing.

I have big plans for myself in this area. Because I am the type person that loves being outside, I’m going to look up what it is that people do to be outside when it’s hot. It can’t be that hard. People have been doing it for millions of years. There’s so much more to do in Houston than complaining that it’s hot.

Although, I have a theory about that, too. I don’t even think Houstonians care that much about the heat. You can spend birth to death only experiencing Houston heat from the time it takes to get from a car to a building (or vice versa). The heat is just something we collectively bitch about so that even when we don’t have one damn thing to say to each other, we can still talk about sumthin.’ Portlanders have the same relationship with the rain.

Which brings this to my attention: in terms of weather, I hate Portland and Houston equally, because they’re annoying in the same way. The air is wet. In Houston, it’s hot. In Portland, it’s cold. But it’s all wet, all the time. It’s hard to regulate temperature because you can’t stay dry. It feels shitty to walk around in wet clothes. In Portland, it means that you can’t warm up, even if you add more layers. In Houston, it means your clothes feel like you should have left them in the dryer for ten more minutes EVERY DAMN DAY. And let’s not even talk about how that translates with underpants.

Dana is snoring so loud that I can hear her from the living room. Dana’s breathing is the antiphonal rhythm section to my typing fingers.

I am starting to think about other things. The grief that has upended the last three or four months is stabilizing into a different shade of normal. I talked to Dana today about how I knew that in some ways, this type of grief had been building for many years, but that I was afraid to go through it. I was afraid to experience this level of pain. I was afraid to see if I could take it. Until four months ago, I didn’t have the courage to talk about my life experiences, and only some of it was due to my own emotional ability.

I didn’t want to hurt anyone, and I knew that these stories would explode my life and the lives of others in a way that God only knew what would happen. This knot of fear has been building in my stomach for 25 years, all of it related to not being able to talk to anybody about anything at any time.

And then I became that age where not resolving your childhood issues becomes damaging enough that you realize it’s why you’ve been damaging yourself. And if you don’t release yourself from your past stories, two things will happen. The first is that any shot you have at focusing on anything else is nil. The second is that the knot of fear just keeps getting bigger.

I waited a lot longer than I should to realize that fear was passing into anxiety. Anxiety is the emotion in me that I like to talk about the least, because it is truly laying my cards on the table. I am mildly socially anxious all the time. I am clever enough to be funny, so I will always have a witty comeback. Inside, I am usually trying to figure out how to get out of talking to you. You is plural, and can mean anyone. Usually, it’s Dana, because she’s the one that’s most often around me. It is nothing personal, it’s that if I don’t interact with you, I can’t conflict with you. I go out of my way to make sure that our interactions are as pleasant as possible because I want you to think I’m the type person you can talk to.

The truth is, I am. But I am such a fallible person that it means a lot to me that my  friends be able to handle emotional fallout. I choose to be friends with people who have large emotions so that I don’t have to feel bad when I start talking about myself. I want to make sure that you’re fucked up enough to understand how fucked up I am and to be able to call me on it.

However, the problem with doing that is you get dumped on by a lot of psychos who have so much story to tell that there’s no room for yours. In time, you start to feel that of everyone in your life, your story is the least important of all.

My past pattern has just been to sit there and listen to you until I’m so full of emotion that I can’t see straight and then I let you get away with just saying, “well, goodnight!” I have a long fuse for “they’ll get me next time.” Nope. If you let them, people really will use you as an emotional trash compactor. Learning boundaries for me has been learning to say things like, “we only have half an hour and I’ve listened to your life for 25 minutes. Call me later, because I need an ear, too.”

The benchmark for me in friendship is set by the people who call back.

 

I have written about death and grief a lot. What I haven’t written about is why I’m personally grieving. People that know me in an offline way have details, but no one knows everything… except me… and that’s the entire problem. It feels like I’m locked up, and when I try to express my emotions, I get a range from “God, I am so sorry” to “get over it.”

Because that’s how grief works, right? You just say “snap out of it” and people get it. People have been CURED over “snap out of it.” Yes, that was extreme sarcasm. I have a hard time not screaming at the people who tell me to just get over it. Seriously, who the fuck has the right to say what my process is or should be? Relationships take a long time to get out of your system if you’ve known the person for one year, much less 25.

So while you’re saying “get over it,” I’m saying “I will… but in my own time. Shut the hell up.”

My favorite way to grieve is to go to the places that the person I lost would meet me. The places that are “ours.” When I get there, I just start talking. It doesn’t matter that they’re not there. My grief is not *for* them. I know that sounds funny to say, but especially since my grief is for a friendship that ended and not a person who died, it doesn’t matter to me whether my friend is with me or not. I just talk, anyway.

I have to feel that in some small way, the universe is holding my stories. I have to believe that by getting them out of my body and out into the ether that one day, I won’t have to hold onto them anymore.

But I don’t just talk about serious things. Sometimes I tell myself jokes and stories between us that make me roll on the ground with laughter, and those are moments I cherish, because that means that it is *just* grief. I am not also trying to be angry, because why be angry? What’s it doing for me? I have been angry about this situation for years, and it’s never gotten me anywhere. That’s how I had to decide to let go of the friendship altogether. I realized that I was putting someone else’s happiness above my own, because that’s what I thought I needed to believe.

We met two months shy of my 13th birthday. I am now one month away from my 36th. There was an 11 year age gap between us, which we both did our best to bridge. Because of this, information passed between us as equals. Because we are both so damn funny, it covered up some real emotional scars for many, many years- I was living vicariously through an adult, and a lot of it scared me.

When I got scared, I would do what I could to protect her, which wasn’t much… but it was what I could do.

I could listen.

I thought I was helping her by being that friend she could always go to for comfort and solace. In retrospect, I realize now that it helped me to grow up too fast. I felt like I was becoming responsible for her behavior instead of it just being reported. I took on the mantle of trying to take care of her, but she didn’t realize that her stories had that kind of impact on me.

I was so young when the pattern started that it is just now occurring to me to stop. It is excruciating, this major emotional surgery. It is my life’s work to unpack 25 years of memories and take them all in stride.

Because that’s just what unconditional love does. It allows you to look at all sorts of memories without being threatened by them. It allows you to see yourself as you are in your interactions with others. It allows you to love yourself as much as you love everyone else.

Which sounds so hippy-dippy and weird for someone who’s moving back to Texas.

Grief is so weird. The best grief counselor in the world agrees with me, because I stole that line from her. I hate how one minute you’re cleaning out your office and the next you’re absolutely sobbing over the handwritten notes you didn’t know were in your memory box, because the box just happened to fall over at the precise moment you were feeling like ripping your heart out would just be easier. As Josh Woodward said in the song, “I’ll Be Right Behind You, Josephine”, “if you ripped my heart out, the only thing I’d feel is less alone.” Then, ten minutes later, you’re eating popsicles like nothing ever happened.

The best and the worst day just become the same.

Sometimes, it doesn’t happen that way. I know I need to make some space for grief in my life, because there’s no way that someone who shaped my life this much just packs up and leaves. No, she’s with me every step of the way as we pack up the mental house she lived in when she occupied so much space in my head.

It’s her nightstand that’s the hardest, and not because I slept on the other side of the bed. Quite the contrary. It’s my head. My house is much bigger. And has a pool. And free umbrella drinks from 4-7 every Thursday.

But I digress.

Her nightstand- where she kept all her journals and letters. I could barely read them before, but now the ink is fading on her hieroglyphics. One tear fell years ago, and is marked by a big blotch of blue ink on the bottom right corner.

I remember Massenet’s opera Werther, Charlotte clutching Werther’s letters to her chest and trying to smell the flowers he sent for any trace of lingering odor. In this small way, I am Charlotte and Charlotte is me- the age old story of losing someone you love (or, at least, thinking you did).

What Charlotte has that I do not is that her feelings are not particularly conflicted. She is in love with Werther, and there is no downside to consider. In the real world, relationships are more complicated than that. She’s verbally abusive. She’s emotionally underhanded. She is capable of looking me in the eye and telling me things that are not true. She’s toxic and letting her live in that mental house for so long was a disaster ’cause she kept building additions.

The problem with this analogy is that I am exactly like her. I’m just as much of an asshole, if not better at it than she is because I learned from the best. It is annoying as hell to know this, but at the same time, it is an inescapable truth. She manipulated the hell out of me, and as a result, I can play her like a piano, too. She hates that.

I hate that out of all the people I’ve known for the last quarter century, I never thought to make sure that I stayed friends with someone who knew her. There is no one to say that my story has any validity. There’s no way to fact check anything, because anybody who would have seen us together is someone I absolutely would have run away from. They didn’t think we were having sex, they knew it. The problem was that we weren’t. At all. The rabid homophobia around us prevented people from seeing that we weren’t physically together… they just really wanted to believe it.

This grief is the death of my mothermentorsisterfriend, and the death of my biggest enemy. We could not be that close without being that terrible to each other. Our defenses became impenetrable, because they are made from the same material.

I took what I thought was going to be a short nap, maybe twenty minutes. That was almost 7 hours ago. As a result, it’s almost 2:30 in the morning, and I am wide awake. I have no idea what I want to say, I just want you people to sit with me while I try to think of something wonderful.

Here in the dark and quiet recesses of the evening transitioning to dawn, I write. Actually, a better description would be that I sit here. If something hits, I’ll write it down. Otherwise, I am generally staring off into space, hoping that something flying by will create brilliance on my part. I’ll let you know if I get there. I’m just feelin’ nice right now, and despite being stone-cold sober, there’s an air around me of intoxication. Despite having almost a full night’s sleep, my circadian rhythm is telling me that I should be in bed. I am punch-drunk with the type of exhaustion you feel when you’ve been asleep for a long time, but not resting. You wake up and your body is just as tired and achy as when you drifted off.

As a result, I’m sitting in my bean bag chair. I like how it molds to me instead of making me bend to it. When I first got it, I thought I’d bought the wrong size, like it was for a child or something. Then I figured out that you have to sit in it for a long time before it starts to stretch out. Now, it’s perfect. I sleep in it regularly.

Dana and I are not angry people. The reason I often sleep in my bean bag chair instead of with Dana in bed is that I am not as good as she is about starting a TV show and staying awake all the way until the end. And then, I have the audacity to not be very good-natured when she tries to wake me up enough to get me back to our bedroom. Over time, we’ve both just agreed that if I’m asleep, just leave me there.

I try to be sensitive to the fact that I cannot do it very often, this sleeping in front of the TV thing. Not sleeping together in and of itself will not hurt Dana and me, but it doesn’t help, either. My first wife and I were not as close as Dana and me, so when there weren’t many things we connected on, not sleeping together became a huge, huge deal. That’s because I was “falling asleep to the TV.” I didn’t realize that I was using it as a coping mechanism to get out of sleeping next to her. That’s never happened in the history of my relationship with Dana, it’s just something that I’m aware of in myself.

One of the things that Al-anon has given me is the valuable lesson of self-inventory. Know the ways in which you are an angel, and the ways in which you are an asshole. You can’t believe what knowing yourself will do to you. It’s like getting glasses specifically designed to show you bullshit where it exists. You become sort of a bullshit-detecting superhero… mostly because you figure if you’re capable of it, so is everyone else.

I need some iced tea. Hold please.

There, that’s better. I’ve had a bit of a cold the last few days, so I’ve been trying to keep my voice moisturized and fairly happy. I put agave syrup in my tea to make it a little more viscous and do the whole “throat coat” thing. I’m not coughing as much, but you can definitely tell I’ve got a bit of laryngitis going on. My speaking voice hasn’t quite lowered the octave, but I’m sure I could cigar and vodka it down if I had to.

Speaking of singing, I’m pretty sure that altos and basses live on cigars and vodka, while sopranos and tenors live on shoes and compliments.

And on that note, I’m off.